On Wednesday, December 4, the president-elect announced that his nominee for NASA administrator will be Jared Isaacman. If you’re not overly familiar with the ins and outs of private spaceflight, you may have no idea who this is or why it matters. Jared Isaacman, NASA Administrator Who is Jared Isaacman? Isaacman: The background NASA: Redundancy is important. Isaacman disagrees. But Isaacman could save Chandra Will he cancel SLS, NASA’s moon rocket? Isaacman’s close ties to SpaceX are conc...

Should you filter devices by MAC address on your Wi-Fi access point and/or network? Almost certainly not . But while I’ll probably get in trouble for admitting it, Clara and I do. We have for years, and it works fine for us. MAC address filtering is considered a Bad Idea™ for these reasons: They’re transmitted in plaintext, so an attacker can sniff MAC addresses in use, send a disassociation request, and spoof it. This is feasible for literally anyone, whether they’re a seasoned...

Amazon released three new Large Language Models yesterday at their AWS re:Invent conference. The new model family is called Amazon Nova and comes in three sizes: Micro, Lite and Pro. I built a new LLM plugin called llm-bedrock for accessing the models in the terminal via boto3 and the Amazon Bedrock API . My initial impressions from trying out the models are that they're mainly competitive with the Google Gemini family. They are extremely inexpensive - Nova Micro slightly undercut...

The Verge has finally shipped the new paywalled version of their site and added a subscription . I personally have nothing against that move and I think freemium is the way forward if we want sites to be sustainable and not be invaded with ads. The personal highlight of the new version is obviously this: Subscribers will also get access to full-text RSS feeds Hell yeah, full RSS feeds are back. That said though, one thing is a big no-no: You can now pay to get fewer ads The corr...

The Orbital Index Issue No. 296  | Dec 4, 2024 🚀 🌍 🛰   Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! We want to express our gratitude for all the g...

Now in one place all of my sixty favorite theorems from the six decades of computational complexity (1965-2024). 2015-2024 Graph Isomorphism  (Babai) Sensitivity  (Huang) Quantum Provers  (Ji-Natarajan-Vidick-Wright-Yuen) Dichotomy  (Bulatov, Zhuk) Algebraic Circuits  (Limaye-Srinivasan-Tavenas) Extracting Ramsey Graphs  (Chattopadhyay-Zuckerman) Random Oracles  (Håstad-Rossman-Servedio-Tan) Parity Games  (Calude-Jain-Khoussainov-Li-Stephan) Gradient Descent  (Fearnley-Goldberg-Hollen...

As a monster designer, I’m interested in seeing where the 2024 Monster Manual takes monster design. How compatible are 2014 and 2024 monsters? What are the benchmarks for a monster of a given Challenge Rating, and has it changed? I wrote about this before when we had a very small handful of monsters. By now we have a surprisingly large number of 2024-style monster previews – I count about 60 between the PHB, Monster Manual previews, and the free adventures Scions of Elemental Evil and U...

Sometimes, when writing tests in Pytest, I find myself using fixtures that the test function/method doesn’t directly reference. Instead, Pytest runs the fixture, and the test function implicitly leverages its side effects. For example: import os from collections.abc import Iterator from unittest.mock import Mock , patch import pytest # Define an implicit environment mock fixture that patches os.environ @pytest.fixture def mock_env () -> Iterator [ None...

Death might seem like a pure loss, the disappearance of what makes a living thing distinct from everything else on our planet. But zoom in closer, to the cellular level, and it takes on a different, more nuanced meaning. There is a challenge in simply defining what makes an individual cell alive or dead. Scientists today are working to understand the various ways and reasons that cells disappear… Source Death might seem like a pure loss, the disappearance of what makes a living thing distin...

Before my first sip of coffee today, I saw a colleague share their Spotify Wrapped. It’s that time of year again! Excited to see the collection of songs I had listened to most this year, I picked up my coffee and sipped it as I went to the other room to get my phone. First, coffee. Then, music! Spotify Wrapped walked me through the eras of music to which I had listened this year, reminding me of many artists whose music I have appreciated but haven’t listened to in months. It also mentione...

Having got an initial data product, Kiran Prakash leads us through the next steps: covering similar uses cases to generalize the data product, determining which domains the products fit into, and considering service level objectives. more… Having got an initial data product, Kiran Prakash leads us through the next steps: covering similar uses cases to generalize the data product, determining which domains the products fit into, and cons...

Setting up a new mail server 2024-12-04 05:25 Setting up a new mail server can be a daunting task, filled with technical hurdles and configuration nuances. Recently, I decided to take on this challenge to better manage my emails and enhance security. Here's how I navigated the process and the steps I found most effective. This is not a detailed procedure, you can find many on the internet, this is just the way I've done it. Choosing a stable operating system The foundation of a reliable ...

cargo-semver-checks v0.37 can now scan Cargo.toml files for breakage! In this post: a primer on Rust package features, and how innocuous-looking Cargo.toml changes can break your users. cargo-semver-checks v0.37 can now scan Cargo.toml files for breakage! In this post: a primer on Rust package features, and how innocuous-looking Cargo.toml changes can break your users. cargo-semver-checks v0.37 can now scan Cargo.toml files for breakage! In this post: a primer on Rust package fe...

Companies break promises all the time. A self-guaranteeing promise does not require you to trust anyone. You can verify a self-guaranteeing promise yourself. File over app is a self-guaranteeing promise. If files are in your control, in an open format, you can use those files in another app at any time. Not an export. The exact same files. It’s good practice to test this with any self-proclaimed file-over-app app you use. “Stainless steel” is a self-guaranteeing promise. You can tes...

This is a summary curation of prior posts of mine on why post, what to post, and how to post, as well as some bits I wrote on the # IndieWeb wiki. This post assumes you already have a blog — if you don’t have one and wonder why you should, that’s a different blog post. If you have a blog and ever feel stuck about why you should post, what to post next, or how to write your post, hopefully this post will help you get unstuck, and publish your post. Why Post There is a whole wiki page on th...

With a 13 billion year head start on evolution, why haven't any other forms of life in the universe contacted us by now? teaching the aliens how to exit Vim ( Arrival is a fantastic movie . Watch it, but don't stop there - read the Story of Your Life novella it was based on for so much additional nuance.) This is called the Fermi paradox : The Fermi Paradox is a contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, such as in the Dra...

The “simple” 38 step journey to getting an RFC The Internet is built on the mutual understanding of network protocols and practices, and most of those protocols are defined using Request For Comments (RFC) or Best Common Practices (BCP) documents. The “simple” 38 step journey to getting an RFC The Internet is built on the mutual understanding of network protocols and practices, and most of those protocols are defined using Request For Comments (RFC) or Best Common Practices (BCP) ...

On Substack & Blogging by Manuel Moreale Manu isn’t a fan of Substack, and he’s got two big reasons why: it takes control away from creators, and it pushes a “monetise everything” culture. He makes a solid case for owning your own domain and keeping blogging authentic and independent. Read Post → I agree with all that Manu says in his post. I won't rehash it here - go read it instead. I...

AmpereOne: Cores are the new MHz Cores are the new megahertz, at least for enterprise servers. We've gone quickly from 32, to 64, to 80, to 128, and now to 192-cores on a single CPU socket! Amazon built Graviton 4 , Google built Axiom , but if you want your own massive Arm server, Ampere's the only game in town. And fastest Arm CPU in the world is inside the box pictured above. It has 192 custom Arm cores running at 3.2 Gigahertz, and in some benchmarks, it stays...

At the very core of telephone history, there is the telephone operator. For a lot of people, the vague understanding that an operator used to be involved is the main thing they know about historic telephony. Of course, telephone historians, as a group, tend to be much more inclined towards machinery than people. This shows: websites with information on, say, TD-2, seldom tell you much about the operators as people. Fortunately, telephone operators have merited more than just a bit of discussio...

The ‘follow your passion’ concept is a trap. Passion has limits. Passion is not consistent enough to follow. You’re trundling along, merrily following your passion. You're sure of eventual success. You believe some ongoing measure of happiness is guaranteed. Then you hit a block. An obstacle. Negative feedback. An undeveloped skill. Missing resource. Not enough time. Unexpected complication. Conflict. Now you’re feeling kind of, uh, non-passionate. Big trouble, pal. If passio...

It is the job of modern programming languages to be amenable to abstractions. It should be easy for users to take a little bundle of functionality and reuse it, or build something more complex on top of it, or give it to someone else to use. A good programming language gives you a set of primitives and tools to combine them into more complex functionality. So, let's be clear, this : is not something you should want to do! The development of programming languages over the past few decades ...

I have read the following recent-ish books about software engineering management (or in a few cases, read the first couple of chapters and just skimmed the rest). For the most part they treat the Silicon Valley model as a given, and if they touch on things like labor rights or what systemic discrimination reveals about how the system actually works, they do so only in passing. If you know of other books that are specifically about managing software development teams, were published after 2010, a...